Night
by Bean Sprouts
Summary: Honda has been suffering from the same nightmare since he was four. It is beginning to dawn on him it isn't just a nightmare. He discovers Ryou Bakura's sister, Rosa, is the catalyst to help him fill in his many blanks.
1. Prologue

Disclaimer: I definitely do not own _Yu-Gi-Oh!_ This is a fan fiction (a fan fiction based on fragmented hearsay at that), and is not done for monetary profit. It's for emotional satisfaction. I can see what I'm capable of writing, and by writing, I'm expanding my own boundaries of thought.

"Mourn" is technically the prequel to "Night." It explains how Rosa Bakura gets the ways she is. "Night," I think, is a project spanning five short pieces, including this one. I suppose "Mourn" takes place a few months after Battle City. "Invisible," which stars Honda, takes place two years later, abruptly followed by "Awaken," Rosa's next piece. Bakura is both "Ryou" and "Bakura" in this piece. Dark Bakura is always Yami Bakura. 

Prologue:: Mourn

This is not a fantasy. I didn't suddenly realize something was wrong thousands of miles away by using a mysterious psychic power. At the time, I was in France. My voice was flying into the air with the rest of the harsh chorus, singing France's bloody anthem. My heart was rising because I was a part of the semi-talented group of students chosen to perform in the school concert. A harsh sun beat down on us, and the uniform stuck to my clammy skin uncomfortably, urban pollution flowing up my conditioned nose. With sweet French exploding up my throat and pouring out of my mouth, how could I have known anything? I was one of the few chorus members managing to hit most notes, and I was proud of it.

I didn't know anything was wrong until a few days after the event. "Your brother is missing," I read in an email from my father, "your brother, Ryou." My father and brother had been on the Pacific Rim, specifically Domino City, Japan. What my father didn't write was that Ryou had seemed to disappear off the face of this planet. The police had traced him to an exact location, as Ryou had been muddling about in Seto Kaiba's Battle City Duel Monsters tournament that day. After that, the police could find no sign of Ryou, causing my father to all ready live in grief. 

I attentively watched the computer screen, as my brother was declared "missing," and then finally, "assumed dead." My father had to take me from the trusted care of Aunt Toyomi in France. I traveled to my mother's homeland of Japan for Ryou's memorial ceremony. It was more than that to me though, because half of the Bakura family was dead.

My mother, Riku Bakura, had died when I was six. Upon the death of Riku, her sister Toyomi had stepped in to raise me when grief, an active job, and two children overwhelmed my father. Ryou had been a quiet, calm person even at that age. To ease the burden, Toyomi took me with her to France. I had been a hyperactive six-year-old bundle of energy. Father's career demanded that he travel often, and move nearly every three or four years. He saw the security and stable environment Toyomi provided, and let me take permanent residence with my aunt in Paris. Toyomi practically became my mother, and her two children my siblings. Admittedly, they became my real family. My father and Bakura became the relatives I saw frequently on holidays. 

I liked them, but never assigned them the awesome devotion I felt for Toyomi. I never knew Ryou the same way I knew Jean-Luc and Mari. With them, I bickered and stole the remote control out from under their noses. With Ryou, I conversed as if I were some self-respecting adult, rather than the wild and creative young woman I was growing to become. Even so, his death came hard. I actually termed his death as his disintegration into nothingness. Going to Japan only served one purpose, because I knew that only there would I be able to mourn. 

Aunt Toyomi and my cousins flew to Domino City. We helped set up the ceremony, and decided to hold it outside. Rather than a grave, we paid for a six-foot monolith of pure white marble to bear his name. This monolith was in a graveyard among trees, and very near the sea. That early evening, the Bakura family stood in respect of the monolith, Ryou's picture on the ledge. Everyone held a candle, and my father nearly broke into tears during his speech.

"We wanted this near the sea so Ryou could hear it, if his soul ever presides here," my father mentioned softly. I still wasn't sure if I believed in souls or God. In my view, that God was a harsh man. Our dysfunctional family was tormented, only not breaking at the seams because there weren't any holding us together. Jean-Luc looked at me, a stern-faced and hardhearted girl, as my father nearly clawed his heart out and placed it on the monolith, still warm and bathed in its own essence.

I still couldn't cry. I was trying to remain placid despite the errors in my life. Who had written this? My brother had died at sixteen, before I could even grasp who he really was. Something seemed wrong in my gut. At the end of the ceremony, I blew out my candle rather than joining it with the main flame in front of Ryou's picture. I left in bitterness and discomfort, avoiding the consolations of my father's friends.

Bakura was something of a mystery to me. His true personality was hard to pen down. Ryou, and incredibly shy boy, had been an excellent actor. Once I had heard him speaking in a raspy, dark voice completely unlike his own, while he had locked himself inside his room. His accent had been obliterated at that time. Ryou had also owned this strange Egyptian artifact my father had given to him some time ago. It was called the Millennium Ring, and was a gold circle with five dangling prongs. Seeing it had creeped me out every time, yet Ryou had always worn it under his clothes.

A few days later, my emotions caught up with me. I went to the monolith by myself, and collapsed against the base. I began crying and found I couldn't stop, lying in the grass with the cold stone kissing my cheek. I cried from the agony bundled in my chest, a ball of emotion I hadn't had the chance to disperse. It had been keeping me awake most of the time since the ceremony. I wept until my eyes were sore and my head pounded, only to fall asleep against Bakura's bodiless grave. This monolith offered me no comfort, and felt wrong because its meaning was incorrect. We still weren't even sure if my brother was dead.

__

The fire and brimstone of eternal damnation was encompassed in this world of shadows. You were in danger of losing your mind here. This dimension pressed down on the human consciousness with despair, encouraging one to adopt a completely depressive state. The world of shadows contained the roads to the darker corners of a person's soul. I was suddenly walking one these paths as I went deeper into the swirling darkness. God had built this place in a total wrath, after finding the imperfection of his sentient creations. Then again, I can't dictate was God finds perfection. God may find perfection in the explosive duality of human nature.

_With my eyes, I could see clearly despite the darkness. Perhaps I saw too well, as the pathetic- ness of my own emotions was flung in my face. To survive here, you had to stay strong. There was no other option, and Darwin's "survival of the fittest" concept ran more fully here than it did in nature. Tears falling silently down my face, I walked into a land whose very properties could defy death. The price was one only the most ruthless could pay, and this realm of shadows had no mercy for the innocents drawn into its trap._

Then I saw him. He was almost snow-haired, dressed in jeans and a creamy sweater, while the Millennium Ring glowed fiercely at his neck. I stopped about five yards from Ryou Bakura. He snapped around to meet me without even having heard me beforehand. His eyes were narrowed in anger at my intrusion, and also the world in general. Nothing about him was gentle. This was the piece of Bakura I had always sensed was there, locked beneath that bully-target exterior. This part of my brother was one of the few who could inhabit this dimension and survive.

Surprise swept through his features, and his Ring suddenly grew fiercer. Obviously this dark part of my brother's soul expected me to be frightened. I wasn't, and just stared at him in rage. Underneath this personality was also my brother, hiding away from a reality he could never understand. I could also sense that Ryou was so alone.

"You aren't the Bakura that I know," I hissed, and the dark personality smiled maliciously, his teeth bright white against the darkness of this dimension. He was defined by jagged, calculated edges, even his hair and eyes taking on that nature.

"I'm his darkness young mortal," the being answered in honesty. That was it: he was Yami Bakura. I didn't want him _though; I wanted the light Bakura. Ryou instead lain within this Bakura, away from all darkness except for his own. "I'm all that stands between Ryou and the Shadow Realm. By himself, he's too weak to survive."_

"You," I mean both Yami Bakura and Ryou, "are alive?"

"Alive, but stuck in this dimension for the time being. I wonder how you managed to come here, Rosa," Yami Bakura glanced at me. I stared him down in return, "You are of my line too. Maybe I should have used you for a host." Yami Bakura looked me over. I didn't know what he meant, but he seemed somewhat insane with the Millennium Ring highlighting his face.

"What happened to imprison you here?" I asked, and Yami Bakura's face lost any sign of humor. He refused to speak, but instead honored with me with a taste of the past. Placing his hands against my head, I saw how a lost game had locked him in this dimension. In a moment, Yami Bakura let me go. He had been playing a dark, magical duel, and Yami Bakura's price for losing was the forfeit of not only his chances at life, but Ryou's as well. With dark eyes, I could only think of the nearly irreversible punishment they faced now.

"The magic of the Millennium Items destroyed my home, so long ago," Yami Bakura muttered to himself, briefly glancing off into the distance. He then stared down at me, "I will get revenge, for Ryou and me. I only pray that none of my children play the Shadow Games like I did. That horrid time should be over forever, especially after this."

"I'll pray for Ryou," I whispered, opening my eyes as rain splattered on to my nose. I got up and took stock of the weather, cold water starting to pour from a dark gray sky. I made no effort to move as the storm grew fiercer, thundering and booming with all the might of a god behind it, tracing the lines of my brother's name.

**Ryou Evan Bakura**

My agony had turned despair. That had been no dream; it had been the truth. Letting the clouds cry for me, I contemplated the fates beset on the members of my family.

A bit later, I heard the wet grass squeaking against someone's shoes. I thought it was my father, but I turned to see a young man. Dressed in black, the only major color on him was his ridiculous hair. There was a gold pyramid around his neck, giving me a familiar creepy feeling. The boy had an innocent aura about him, and was ducked under an umbrella. The teenager walked toward the monolith, and upon seeing me, started to run. I recognized him from Yami Bakura's memories. Yami Bakura had aligned him with some personality labeled the "Pharaoh," but this boy more seemed like Ryou than royalty. 

"Hey, are you all right? It looks like you were out here during that storm!" the boy stated an extremely obvious fact, but he was genuinely concerned, "What's your name?" 

"Rosa Bakura," I answered. The boy paused, and his eyes widened. He placed the umbrella down and sat on the ledge beside me.

"You must be Bakura's sister! I was a friend of Ryou's; I'm Yuugi Mouto. What were you doing out here during the storm?" Yuugi asked as I wrung my soggy lilac mane out. This boy knew what had happened to Ryou. He too owned a Millennium Item, and this pyramid's brother, the Millennium Ring, was partly responsible for my brother's imprisonment. I made a wry smile and chuckled heartlessly.

"I was learning the truth," I glanced again at Bakura's name. Then I got up, startling Yuugi. He was pretty nice, and I was sorry I was acting so distant. Yuugi Mouto smiled warmly, and grasped my cold hand in his.

"I'm sorry about your brother," the boy then added, "You better get home. The temperature is dropping."

"I will," I began walking away, and turned to look at him one more time, "Thanks, but there is no reason to be sorry."

With that, I began running out of the graveyard. Why was there no reason to be sorry? Ryou was alive, and you save such speeches for death. Visiting his monolith had not brought me relief. I'm not sure I can find peace because my brother is alive in hell. I can only mourn his loss.

_"Mourn:" April 27, 2003-July 9, 2003_


	2. One

__

This is one of those stories begun from an assumption. Some people say Yami Bakura ends up trapped in the Shadow Realm. Even if that does happen in the anime, that doesn't mean he'll stay there. Due to my lack of information, this is a "what if" story. In the long run, it doesn't even have much to do with the show. With this story, it isn't necessary to be correct about what happens in the show.

Disclaimer: I do not own the show _ Yu-Gi-Oh!_ or any of the cartoon's characters.

**__**

NIGHT

Part One:: Invisible

****

Every time, five minutes before dawn…

I wake up, realizing I'm caught in short sobs…

My chest is shaking, restricting painfully against the bed… 

Wet, hot tears stain the sheets and fall on to my hands. 

I'm not just full of emotion. I'm the Anguish and Loss I can't explain…

I can not remember what is gone…

I just know that I failed greatly.

It's my fault.

__

It's my fault!

Perhaps once a year I dream this way. The dreams I wake up crying.

The trailing pale braid that goes around her head and then falls forever.

The blood that splatters everything in a volcanic surge.

The scream…

****

Then I wake up, every time, five minutes before dawn.

It happened again this morning. My strange weeping woke me up. I heard the scream ringing in my ears, and experienced a bile-rising horror at failing an unknown task. I don't know what I failed at, I just know that I did lose, for the first time in my life. Turned on my stomach, my eyes opened and I was breathing in harsh but quiet gasps. Immediately like always I flipped over, to see the clock switch from 6:55 to 6:56. The sunrise was at 7:00 today. As usual, nothing has changed about the scenario. I had hoped that even a second of it would be different-that might mean I was finally free from this exact, terrifying, life-long repetition of nightmares.

__

So I laid in bed until dawn. At 7:01, groaning with the muddled, clouded feeling of my brain and limbs, I got up and stumbled down a dark hall way to the bathroom. In the usual routine after one of the dreams, I ran the shower and was doused by water. The liquid was warmed by a furnace illegally dysfunctional before noon. The cold water numbed me, but washed away the cloudy wall around my senses. The feeling of being covered in blood was also gone, to my great relief. After the shower, I stepped out and went to get dressed for school, feeling a great deal better. Only the feeling about the failure I couldn't remember remained. No one would guess about the dream. Hey, I could even fool myself on a day like this. I looked at myself in the mirror, met by the confident, strong-lined eighteen-year-old face and odd tawny eyes of Honda Hiroto.

_Have a great day Honda, _I thought to the image in the mirror. He agreed and wished me the same with a beaming smile. Then it was downstairs, to the smell of scattered but cooking breakfast. My father, a soy sauce bearded man with yellow-green eyes and a love of giant trucks, was up before me even now. As I came downstairs, my long coat trailing behind my legs, he just had to turn and stare at me with surprise and concern. That made me feel _so_ much better. I sat down at the table and grabbed today's newspaper to read the movie, sports, and cuisine sections, trying to ignore him. He left the bacon sizzling to crisps just to keep his eyes locked on me.

"What, do you want me to go see a psycho-therapist about this?" I tried to joke as if my nightmares weren't a big deal. To almost everyone I knew, except my parents, Honda was the last person to be bothered-no, haunted-by repetitive dreams. I was the tall fighter of the streets, a great friend and a terrible strategist. I was no Duel Monsters player like my friends, the champions Yuugi Mouto and Katsuya Jounouchi. Heck, I was even worse than Anzu. Though loud-mouthed and rougher natured than my friends, I admit I owned a soft spot for girls.

My father's eyes just narrowed in some emotion I couldn't name…Suspicion? Regret? Then he turned around and went back to our poor bacon, and didn't say anything about the fact he knew I had had another nightmare. Beyond the fact my mother and father had been really concerned when I was little, they now accepted them as a daily fact about their son Honda. I couldn't understand the emotions I saw behind my parents' eyes when the nightmares came up, but I didn't care. For me they barely existed, a small dark part inside me. Any other person would have been disturbed by my parents' reactions, but I felt the dreams were _my _failure. I could ask my parents and friends for help on any issue but this one. They were _my_ fault, and _my_ responsibility.

Mine alone.

It was autumn, and for me, my last year of school. I was one of those big guys on campus, a senior of Domino High School. It was still pretty early in the year, but there was a strong sense of foreboding around me. _Time to leave the nest little birdie. If you don't leave, we'll kick you in the butt._ I didn't mind this in the least. I was excited about the last of year of school, and especially for college. I was perfectly fine with being kicked out the parental nest by the butt. There were harder things in life, some of them I had all ready met with, that were harder than learning how to fly.

The dream was still haunting me, but I shoved it into the tiniest corner of my mind. One of my best skills was to focus on other things besides what really troubled me. Perhaps the skill had come from having these nightmares at such a young age, when if I hadn't learned to deal with them, I would have been a psychotic four-year-old scared of everything behind the next corner. Within me there had always been the strength and determined focus to shove emotions away and lock them up from the rest of the world. Things had been getting stressful for me lately. The nightmares had been arriving a lot more recently since the beginning of summer. The dreams were like waters, and I was a riverbed. They were eroding me away more quickly than my banks were being built back by silt. With such force, the nightmares were beginning to break through.

I lived in a poorer part of our town. It had been quite rough growing up here, but my best friend and I had managed to bring a bit of order to this place. I hope we had managed to make it a bit safer for the people who were too young, too weak, or too scared to really survive here. Katsuya Jounouchi had always done well in being my partner of protection and justice, but his heart and soul did not have the same devotion to this cause that mine did. Jou had other things to worry about, such as his Duel Monsters career, his sister, and his father. I can assure you his father is no easy man to deal with…Sometimes, inside me, the only drive is to wipe the streets clean of all their grime and confetti. I want to place my hands against the walls of one the buildings that houses drug dealers, men who try to force innocent young women to work for them, or any other urban evil of this day and age, and blow it to pieces. I've had the feeling before that I could do exactly that, _if _I remembered how.

The sun was shinning into my eyes, glaring at me rather menacingly. I was staring up at the sky as Jounouchi and Yuugi Mouto came around the corner. Yuugi managed to startle me. He still reminded me of a small boy sometimes, as he was extremely short but not scrawny, with a startling clever brain under his jagged hair. Primarily his sparkling eyes reminded me of a child with unsoiled trust and innocence. I had spaced out, lost in my thoughts over the endless nightmare.

"Hey, Honda!" the world famous duelist yelled at me. My nose irregularly angling toward the sky, I jumped and turned to look at my friends with briefly frightened eyes. I felt a little flushed as my heart pounded from the shock, but in a second I managed to put on the large, almost carnivorous smile Honda-the-clown was famous for. I realized I looked sort of goofy in contrast with the dark thoughts going through my head.

_Where was my head? I'm rarely caught by surprise like this, so I must have really been out of it. Maybe I should go see a shrink about this thing, _at that thought my blood ran cold. This was my problem, and I wasn't getting help now. Anyway, how would a shrink take the idea of a nightmare that had occurred the exact same way for the past fourteen years? 

Even my smile disappeared as we started again towards school. Jounouchi just had to notice the fact I was distracted. Unlike the usual day where I talked about school and work, or guzzling food from my family's top class refrigerator (this was one of my favorite hobbies), I couldn't help but be a quiet shadow. The pale braid I kept seeing in the dream, and the scream that followed it, obviously belonged to the same person. What exactly had happened to her? Was I supposed to have protected her? What had she meant to me? Who was she anyway-

"Honda!" I snapped out of the reverie, this time by Jounouchi's summon. The blond teenager looked at me in concern, "How did it go with Miyako? Did she accept when you asked her out? I'm assuming she said no. You're bummed."

I opened my mouth, and immediately let this go. At this point, I had to let Jou and Yuugi believe this was the reason. I hadn't even asked Miyako out yet, if I would at all. I still had my eye on Jounouchi's little sister Shizuka, who was sixteen now. True in my personal promise to protect her and be there for her when Jounouchi couldn't, I was waiting for the time when Jounouchi wouldn't explode every time I called her. I looked down, and pretended to act bummed in the "Honda-the-clown has been dumped once again" way. Actually I was bummed in the "Honda-the haunted has been suffering from nightmares again" way, but my friends had never seen that side of me. I put on a blubbery, hurt look, and nodded to Jounouchi.

"It will be all right Honda," Yuugi looked at me confidently, "There are plenty of other nice girls out there to ask out."

"Except for my sister!" Katsuya Jounouchi added defensively. I gave a small, invisible sigh, and looked up toward the sky again. Shizuka had such a great brother, she'd be off limits even to her husband. Often I wished I had a sibling. I was an only child like Yuugi, which was one of the major similarities between us. Seto Kaiba, Jounouchi, Anzu, and even Ryou all had brothers or sisters. 

Actually, I took that back as I saw Ryou Bakura's younger sister walking towards Domino High on the opposite road. Rosa Bakura was now an only child, as her brother was imprisoned in the Shadow Realm. She was the same age as Shizuka, and now went Domino High as a junior. I didn't know her very well, but she was a pretty young woman with long pale hair, filtered with lilac, blue and gray highlights. She looked about as glum today as I felt, but there were always shadows in her eyes. Life had been very hard on the Bakura family. Looking down to the ground, Rosa's hair bounced around in a long pale braid, swinging as she stepped. A strange feeling went through me. I saw the long braid, and heard a repetion of the scream from my dream in my head. The girl from my dream suddenly had a face. That face was Rosa Bakura's. 


End file.
